


Restitution

by OssaCordis



Category: True Detective
Genre: Depression, M/M, Recovery, Sleep, post-carcosa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 07:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3560615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OssaCordis/pseuds/OssaCordis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I want to not fuck up something important, for once.”</i>
</p>
<p>2012 words on Marty and Rust in the year 2012.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restitution

**Author's Note:**

> _Quidquid vos facit felicem._

There is a dip in the mattress that doesn’t fit his body, and the scent of the sheets fills his mouth with the taste of fresh cut grass and charcoal smoke. Lines of bright light slip between the slits in the blinds and lie across his lap like lazy, golden cats. He loses focus. He drifts. He runs a finger down one crinkled page of _Sports Illustrated_ without looking at it; just feeling the texture… thinking about the sensations of being alive. The corner of the magazine catches his index finger, slices into it, and he closes his eyes and lets the sting sink into him: black and comforting.

* * *

Marty tries to open the door of the bedroom gently, but the hinges squeak and the floorboards crack under his feet. He could probably fix the hinges with a little WD-40, if only he had the time to get around to it. He’s always putting things off, waiting, forgetting, remembering, getting annoyed with himself… Rinse and repeat. Vicious cycle.

“Rust, I gotta pick up your prescriptions from Piggly Wiggly. You want me to get you anythin’ while I’m out?”

Rust’s eyes are closed and his breathing is even, but his forehead is lined with tension.

“Popsicles? Or tea? Maggie says chamomile will…”

There’s a faint twitch in Rust’s jaw.

“Rust, I know when you’re awake.”

“Pack of Camel Blues.”

“You’re really _not_ supposed to be smokin’.”

Rust cracks one eye open. “What are you, the fuckin’ police?”

Marty laughs, not because Rust is particularly funny, but because he finally knows how to recognize a lost cause when he sees one. “Pack of smokes it is, then. How ‘bout some puzzle books…? You like crosswords? Or maybe a few more magazines?”

“You have shit taste in literature.”

“Well, we can’t all be philosophers.”

Rust rolls as far in the bed as his bandages allow. Marty watches for a moment, wondering how and when he first acquired the ability to make everyone in his presence want to get away from him, and then backs out of the bedroom. A guest in his own home. The click of the door latch is the period at the end of the conversation.

* * *

It’s not supposed to be permanent, living with Marty. Rust keeps waiting for the moment when he feels like his feet are back under him, and he can quietly sneak off. Where to, he doesn’t know. He just wants to go. But he stays, day after day, shuffling between bed and kitchen and bathroom. Going through the motions while his mind tries to catch up to the reality around him. Everything is new and startling and confusing. This was not supposed to be his life, and yet here he is.

He hears Marty in the night: stirring on the couch, pacing around the house, fetching glasses of water from the kitchen. Sometimes he calls Maggie.

“He’s just… he sleeps a lot.” A pause. “No, like, more than usual. More than normal. Well, you know. He’s never been normal.” A quiet laugh, muffled. “Yeah, he’s on… hold on, let me look at the bottle.” The clatter of pills against plastic. “Com… ‘Com’ something. Combunox. What’s that?” Deep sigh. “Should he be on an opioid, after, you know…?” The question hangs. “Yeah, alright. I was just worried… I mean, I kinda figured the drugs were knockin’ him out, but I’ll… yeah, I’ll try talk to him. Ok. Yeah. Good night. Oh, and tell Macie… ok. Great. Talk to you later.”

The line of light under the bedroom door flares out, leaving Rust to trace the dark outlines and shadows of bedroom furniture that does not belong to him. He listens to Marty check the lock on the front door, even though he only ever goes out through the garage. And then the TV clicks on: the low hum of late-night ESPN to lull him to sleep. 

* * *

Every Saturday night, Marty makes a point to mention that he’s going to church in the morning, and Rust is welcome to join him if he feels like it.

Rust’s answers swing between the polite, “No, thank you, Marty,” and the profane, “Go fuck yourself.” There’s no predicting which one it will be.

Rust is slowly soaping plates in the kitchen sink while Marty finishes clearing the table. He sets the dishes next to Rust, purses his lips, and asks, “Why?”

“Why what?” Rust says, eyes steadily fixed on his hands.

“Why won’t you come to church with me?”

Rust deliberately rinses a plate off, sets it on the drying rack, and rests his hands against the counter. “I…” He shakes his head. “You know why.”

“Religion is a language virus or somethin’, right? Am I rememb’rin’ that correctly?”

“Or somethin’.”

There are dark blue-black hollows under Rust’s eyes, and Marty is suddenly seized by the urge to press his fingers into them, gently, like he could fill all that empty space. He clenches his hands into fists instead.

Rust flicks a soap bubble into the sink. “I have to figure it out on my own.”

“Figure what out?” Marty asks.

Rust shrugs.

“Why has there always gotta be somethin’ for you to figure out?”

“Because there always _is_.” Rust grips the countertop with enough force to blanch his fingernails white.

* * *

Marty goes back to work, in a couple of weeks. He’s never been the type to sit still.

Rust moves through the house like a ghost when he’s alone: inconsequential to the point of nonexistence. He doesn’t make an attempt to count the days of his recovery, choosing instead to impassively slide through the slipstream of time. When one day is very like the next, it’s easy to let the hours converge.

High on the bookshelf, dusty but with spines cracked, are a series of photo albums. Some of them must date from Marty’s childhood, by the yellow of their pages. Rust doesn’t have childhood photos, and precious few of his life _before_.

Some of the albums are newer, though. Rust – remembering old arguments over whose turn it was to write reports – doubts that Marty is the scrapbooking type. But someone cared enough to collate things for him.

Feeling faintly intrusive, he takes one album down and flips through the laminated pages. Marty and his girls, Christmases and Easters and Halloweens, vacations to the beach. Memories frozen in place. Someone else’s happiness. Maggie’s absence is conspicuous. He decides that she put the albums together: wielding memory like a scalpel to excise herself from Marty’s past. He doesn’t blame her. He sometimes hates her, but can never find it in himself to blame her.

* * *

Perhaps he’s making up for before, Marty thinks. That’s what all this daytime sleeping is about. Filling in those years of running near empty, only coffee and anxiety for fuel. Maybe one or two hours of sleep in his back pocket as defense against the question, “Shit, man, don’t you ever sleep?” Yeah, he would say. Yeah, I got some sleep last night. And as long as you didn’t question him too closely, didn’t try to _quantify_ the hours, then you also didn’t have to worry that he would break down any minute now from exhaustion and that would be the end of that. No more Detectives Hart and Cohle catching cases.

Rust wanders into the kitchen past noon on Saturday. There’s something blurred about the edges of him; though as soon as the thought comes to him, Marty rejects it as nonsense.

“You alright?” Marty asks.

“Hmm?”

“You’re kinda out of it this mornin’.”

“It’s afternoon.”

“You know what I mean.”

Rust nods, rummaging through the refrigerator and retrieving the juice. He stands at the kitchen sink and drinks directly from the carton, despite all the times Marty has asked – no, told: _Please, do not._

“That’s a kite.”

“What?”

Rust peers through the window, head skyward. Marty joins him, leaning over the sink, trying to see what he sees.

“Swallow-tailed kite. Endangered species. There.”

There’s a smudge of black in the sky. Marty squints and can barely make out its shape. “Shit, my eyesight’s not that good anymore.”

Rust ignores him, taking the juice with him out onto the porch. The screen door lazily swings behind him on loose hinges.

“Damn,” Marty mutters. One more forgotten thing to fix.

Rust rests with one hand on the railing, the other cradling the juice. The lazy spirals of the kite transfix him. He tilts his head back further and further, glaring against a late summer sun. He could be gazing into another dimension for all Marty knows. Each subsequent loop is tighter and higher, out of reach and then out of sight.

Tell me, Marty says to Rust in his mind. Talk to me.

He’s the common denominator in a string of dysfunctional relationships. Back when, he and Maggie didn’t talk. Not about anything important, anyways. Nor Audrey, Macie. Whatever attempts he’s made to reach out to them now are well-intentioned and too late.

And then there’s Rust.

Rust is drifting away again, too.

* * *

He doesn’t belong here.

Well, he doesn’t belong anywhere, really. Sticks out like a sore thumb wherever he goes. Travis told him a hundred times or more, and when _Travis_ said you weren’t fit for normal society, it really meant something.

The curtains hang crooked from the rod in the bedroom. It could be that they were just made that way: cheap and thin and uneven so that the headlights shine through the gape, keeping him up at night. Or maybe Marty hung them that way. Somehow, he never learned – or understood – that there are consequences for shortcuts and easy ways out. That fragile things have a tendency to break if you are hard with them.

The TV goes quiet, signaling Marty is tucked in for the night. Rust lets himself melt into the mattress, aligns with the imperfect dip. He tries to empty himself. Wasn’t that what Faulkner said about sleeping in a strange room? But how can you empty yourself when you don’t know yourself?

There’s a short, sharp knock on the door. He can pretend he didn’t hear it.

“It’s your damn house. Come in if you want,” he calls.

The door cracks open like an arthritic joint. Marty is all dark, broad shoulders hesitating in a black doorway. “Honest to God, Rust. You are the most combative person I’ve ever met. I brought you your pain pills.” He rattles the bottle as punctuation. “You didn’t take any tonight.”

“Don’t need them.”

Marty takes a disjointed step.

“I’m not in pain,” Rust amends.

“Then… will you talk to me, like you did at the hospital?”

“What about?”

“Whatever you want.”

Rust sits up a little, dislodging from the spot that is not his that he has made his own. “I’m leavin’ soon.”

Marty closes the remaining space and sinks to the other side of the bed. “Shit. Why?”

“I’m a grown man. Can’t keep takin’ up space. Don’t want charity. Take your pick, I got more reasons if you want.”

“It’s not charity.”

“The fuck is it, then, Marty? Because if it’s not, I don’t know what to call it.”

“I want you here. I want…”

“What?”

Marty pinches the bridge of his nose. “I want to not fuck up something important, for once.”

Rust lets the room settle into silence behind the echo of Marty’s words. He tastes sweet tea and pine in the darkness. Doubt nudges at his mind.

“Stay,” Marty says. “Please?”

Rust chooses his words slowly and carefully. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

* * *

This is not how his life was supposed to turn out. It should have been Maggie, and the girls. A steady job. A peaceful retirement at 62.

It was not supposed to be lying in bed, forehead pressed to the back of a man with a spine like a serrated knife.

It’s not too bad, Marty decides. A little unexpected. But worthwhile.

Rust’s breathing evens out near dawn. And Marty, listening to his steady sounds of inhalation and exhalation, slips away himself.


End file.
